Sigmar Polke

“Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.”

“Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.”

“Light is a metaphoric thing. There is green light and red light. Then there is black light, which is mostly danger.”

“We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.”

“When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.”

“When I came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven.”

“Yes, my works... are enshrined in museums, but I don't care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years.”

“As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.”

“I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.”

“The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.”

“A negative is never finished.”

“By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.”

“Because I was traveling a lot during the '70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn't much painting during those years.”

“I love all dots. I am married to many of them. I want all dots to be happy. Dots are my brothers. I am a dot myself.”

“People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.”

“I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.”

“There has to be an element of risk-taking for me in my work.”